The Best Advice I Ever Got (11 page)

Tavis Smiley

PBS Host, Author, and Philanthropist

Fail Better

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The words of the great writer and poet Samuel Beckett. Words that I have learned to live by.

Anyone who has ever succeeded in any human endeavor will tell you that he learned more from his failures than he ever learned from his successes. If he’s being honest.

But a funny thing happens when “success” becomes an individual’s dominant definer. Very few people want to then actually acknowledge the mistakes they’ve made along the way. That’s unfortunate, because it promulgates an artificial concept of “success.” By artificial, I mean the notion that people become successful without what I call “success scars.” Let’s be clear: There is no success without failure. Period. And usually a lot of it.

I used to love Michael Jordan’s “Failure” commercial for Nike. You might recall it:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.

I’ve lost almost 300 games.

Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot … and missed.

I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.

And that is why I succeed.

Powerful stuff.

When you think about it, Beckett was right. Life is ultimately about failing better. Every day that you wake up, you get another chance to get it right. To fail better. We have to learn to think of failure in a different way. To think of failure as a friend, really. A friend who, if embraced, can usher us into new experiences, exposures, and excellencies.

Just look around—there are examples everywhere of people who have failed up. Others have done it, and you can, too.

Valerie Plame

Former United States CIA Operations Officer and Author of
Fair Game

Life Is Unfair

My father was a career Air Force officer who fought in the South Pacific during World War II. He had a pragmatic approach to life and, growing up, my older brother Robert and I were accustomed to hearing him say, “Life is unfair.” My father applied his favorite bit of wisdom to every one of my childhood protests, from complaints about bad teachers to my desire for a later curfew. At the time, I thought he was just being a pessimist or giving me the brush-off, but in later years I came to realize that this adage was actually his way of challenging me to solve a problem myself, or to figure out a way around it.

The true test for us came in 1967, when my brother, serving as a marine in Vietnam, was wounded behind enemy lines. For weeks, we didn’t know what had happened to Robert—if he had been captured or killed. Rather than succumb to grief, my father sprang to action and contacted our congressman for help. Finally, to our great relief Robert was located on a hospital ship—alive. It certainly “wasn’t fair” that my family had been put through such a traumatic experience, or that my brother would have to spend what should have been his carefree college years in a naval hospital recovering from serious wounds. However, I never heard either my brother or my father complain or feel sorry for themselves; they just got on with life.

Indeed, life isn’t fair. But somehow we always think it should be and are deeply disappointed when things don’t pan out as hoped. What my father was trying to teach me was that, despite this obvious fault in the universe, it cannot be used as an excuse for not trying to be your best self. Instead, use unfairness as a starting point to be sure that your actions are the best you can muster, and find peace in navigating your time here with grace and humor whenever possible.

BE UNREASONABLE

On Passion and Dreams

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested
.

—E. M. FORSTER

L
oving what you do is like winning the lottery. It means that on most mornings getting up and getting going is relatively easy. (Okay, maybe not
every
morning.) It means that you aren’t leading Thoreau’s life of quiet desperation, or trapped in an Edward Hopper painting, going through the motions in a sepia-toned fog, feeling isolated and despondent.

Sometimes it takes a few tries to find your passion. At one time, I thought a career in advertising would be a perfect fit for me—glamorous and creative, like an updated version of
Mad Men
.

So during my senior year at the University of Virginia I came to New York to interview with several agencies. It was a cold, rainy March day and the wind turned my umbrella inside out. I couldn’t find a cab, had a terrible cold, and my mascara was dripping down my face. Interviewer after interviewer looked at me patiently and either told me there was nothing available or to consider going to business school. Finally, after the head of personnel for Grey Advertising said, in essence, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” I really impressed her. I started to cry. She suggested that I find a job closer to my parents. So much for my advertising career. Luckily the TV news thing worked out a bit better.

I love my job, and still marvel at my good fortune. I’ve been given amazing assignments and reported from some extraordinary places: the beaches of Normandy, the hills of Barcelona, the plains of Zimbabwe. I’ve witnessed, firsthand, unimaginable suffering in places like Haiti after the earthquake and war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve gone down a bobsled run at close to a hundred miles per hour, been given a tour of the Reagan Library by Nancy Reagan herself. I’ve visited Number 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair and later Gordon Brown. I’ve flown to Petra in a helicopter piloted by the king of Jordan—a helicopter given to him by the sultan of Brunei. “Hey, it’s good to be king.”

There are also stories that serve as a constant reminder of the enormous responsibility that comes with this job. For me, and for many reporters, covering September 11 was the most challenging assignment of my career. As a single mother, I was worried about my girls. During a commercial break, I called my parents, who live not far from the Pentagon, and told them to go down to the basement. My heart broke every time I talked to someone who was desperately searching for a fiancé, a sister, a father. That story—that day—will be seared into my memory forever.

I’ve covered many history-making events on hot-button issues involving race, gender, and religion: the O.J. Simpson trial; the Rodney King verdict; the Anita Hill hearings; the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man in Wyoming; the controversy over building an Islamic center near Ground Zero. Doing my best to shed light on these critically important but often polarizing stories is incredibly challenging work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You may have some false starts, just like my foray into the ad world, but when you find a job you love, you can’t imagine doing anything else. Of course, not everyone has the luxury of a career of choice, especially when the economy is lousy and jobs are hard to come by. But finding your passion will eventually get you to where you’re supposed to be. And by the way, don’t let money be your mantra. Focusing only on financial success often leaves you with a big bank account and a barren soul. As Twitter’s Biz Stone says, think about what is
really
valuable.

Biz Stone

Co-Founder of Twitter

Think About What Is Valuable

Think about what is valuable before thinking about what is profitable and know that there’s compound interest in helping others—start early!

(That’s
exactly
140 characters including spaces and punctuation!)

“Dr. Phil” McGraw

Mental Health Professional, Bestselling Author, and Television Host

Get Excited About Your Life

Every now and then, someone who’s going through a tough patch will say to me, “Dr. Phil, you spend a lot of time helping others, but I know that, like everyone else, you have had to struggle in life. How did
you
handle it? After all, you couldn’t go see Dr. Phil!”

Of course these people are right: There have been many times when I felt so low that down looked up. At points during my childhood, my family was flat-out dirt poor. Once, when my dad lost his job, he and I worked a paper route, throwing newspapers over a fifty-two-mile-long stretch just to keep food on the table. I never knew what it meant to feel settled, in part because my dad moved our family every three years—from Tulsa to Denver to Oklahoma City, and then on to Kansas City. With each move, I had to start over as the new kid in school, wearing hand-me-down clothes and eating lunch out of a paper sack, if I was lucky. I’m not sure anyone other than my mother saw much potential in me. I was an unremarkable student and, though today it’s hard to believe, I wasn’t a big talker. I shied away from my fellow students, my teachers, and other adults. My one hobby was sneaking out for a joyride in the family’s broken-down car—if I could get the old jalopy going. One day, after I got caught in some mischief, my dad said to me, “Son, you couldn’t be any dumber if we cut your head off!” He was kidding, of course (I think!), but if he had known all that I was up to behind his back, he might have tried it.

My saving grace, and what kept me showing up for school every day, was that I had become a pretty fair athlete—or so I thought. But one afternoon I had a wake-up call when my junior-high football team, which I thought was the toughest, most intimidating bunch of bad dudes around, played a little makeshift Salvation Army team. I was poor but my school wasn’t; we had really good equipment, coaches, and facilities. The opposing team had nothing. The kid who lined up across from me was wearing loafers instead of cleats and rolled-up blue jeans for football pants. Well, you can guess what happened. They beat us like they were clapping for a barn dance. One kid hit me so hard that I swear my shoulder
still
hurts these days when it rains! It was a turning point in my life. Why, I wondered, do some people with no advantages become champions, while those with all the advantages in the world end up failing? After the game, I asked my father, “What in the world just happened?” He said, “Well, son, you just got your butt handed to you on a platter! Those kids wanted it more than you did. Those kids had the ‘eye of the tiger.’ ” From that moment on, regardless of my circumstances, I knew I wanted to have that same focus and passion in my own life.

As time passed, I began asking other questions. I wanted to know how a person could live a life of real meaning and genuine passion instead of just going through the motions. How can someone truly lead a life he or she wants instead of a life someone else wants for him or her? And, I asked over and over again, what must we do to remain perpetually filled with hope and optimism and energy in a world that is sometimes brutally harsh? I ended up taking three hundred hours of college courses and earning my doctorate in clinical psychology in an effort to answer those questions. I didn’t always get the answers right, and there were times when I really struggled. For example, I spent twelve years trapped in a career that made me miserable. I stayed in it because I had created a prosperous life for my family and I didn’t want to rock the boat. Still, I felt like a fraud because, although I was making money, I had no passion. Translation: I sold out. I didn’t wake up excited in the morning. I wasn’t proud of who I was or what I was doing day to day.

I finally realized that I had to break out of that comfort zone where my life felt safe and go after fulfilling the purpose for my being on this earth. I had to look back and “grade my own paper,” so to speak, so that I wouldn’t do the same stupid things again and again. I set out to reengineer those parts of my life that were not “me,” and to build upon those that did feel right. Soon, I had a life that was authentically mine.

There’s a reason I so often say to the guests on my television show, “The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things losers just don’t want to do.” It’s the simple, unvarnished truth. To break out of the routine of life, you have to do what it takes to focus on staying true to yourself and to your own dreams. Instead of ignoring those dreams and hoping you can get around to them later on, you have to be committed to developing an action plan, to creating a “life script” with measurable goals, and to building a core of supporters around you to keep you going in the right direction.

Through these words, I hope I can save you some of the years I wasted. Go find your passion and embrace it. When you do, you will spring out of bed in the morning and sleep fast at night because you
love
what you are doing. There are many kinds of currency in life, not just monetary. I promise you will never regret this work for a moment, because life is not a dress rehearsal. This is your life—your one shot. So get excited and I’ll see you out there in life kicking up your heels and having some fun.